A Futurist Manifesto: Vital English Art by Marinetti and Nevinson was published on the 7th June 1914 in the Times, the Observer and the Daily Mail. The first point I want to make is the level of attention in the press that modern artists in London were getting at the time, both in art journals and in the popular press.
John Rodker in Dial Monthly in 1914 said that, “The leaders
of the new movement, be it painting or music or literature, are paragraphed
daily, their eccentricities detailed, and their photographs scattered
broadcast…” and Wyndham Lewis, with characteristic humility, “The painter could
really become a ‘star’…Pictures, I mean oil paintings, were ‘news’. Exhibitions
were reviewed in column after column. And no illustrated paper worth its salt
but carried a photograph of some picture of mine or of my ‘school’…or one of
myself, smiling insinuatingly from its pages.” (Blasting and Bombadiering
1937).
The press is able to report on developments immediately and
thus stress the ephemerality of the latest thing possibly, thereby accelerating
change in the pursuit of what is literally “news”. The pre-Vorticist group
moved in a very fashion-conscious society, in which the papers seemed to have
assisted their notoriety, but like the latest fad they presumably face the same
fate as being as obsolete as yesterday’s newspaper.
Journalists, particularly in the popular press, were not always
complimentary and so we also have the shock value and controversy of modern art
being part of the attraction for coverage. In fact they seem to have boosted
the avant-garde stereotype and propagated various “ism” labels with the idea of
leaders, followers, dogmas and schisms. The Vorticists could make their
presence publicly known simply by making a noise about disowning Futurism and
the Futurists. It could be said that newspapers
inadvertently caused the schism that led to Vorticism but it would be closer to
the truth to say that artists learned to exploit publicity and its tropes and
techniques in their event management and manifesto publications, hence the use
of headlines in the formatting of the publication Blast.
The English Futurist Manifesto follows the familiar Italian
setting out of those things that are “passatisti” and those that are
“futuristi”; in other words there were two sections of things that they are
“Against” and things “We Want”. The early Futurist manifestos were known in
England and The Futurists themselves exhibited at the Sackville Gallery in
March 1912 and included an extensive catalogue. It was printed in English and
contained the founding manifesto, the painters’ first manifesto, a bespoke section
called ‘The Exhibitors to the Public’ and some explanation of individual
paintings. Earlier, in August 1910, Tramp (Douglas Goldring’s magazine) had
published extracts from the initial manifesto and a letter from Marinetti to Poesia
about his ‘sink Venice’ campaign. Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama of
September 1913 published Marinetti’s Imagination Without Strings and Words
At Liberty manifesto and some of his poetry. Most of Marinetti’s
self-publicity was done by personal appearances, or what he liked to call conferenza,
at places like The Cave of the Golden Calf, the Poet’s Club, The Poetry
Bookshop, Clifford Inn Hall and the Doré Gallery with resultant press reviews.
It's surprising that Marinetti didn’t gain more disciples –
especially amongst the literary cognoscenti. Nevinson seems to have learned
about Marinetti largely through Severini, whom he followed back to Paris after
Severini’s exhibition at the Marlborough Galleries in 1913. Although it should
be mentioned that Henry Nevinson, Christopher’s father, had met and written
about Marinetti in the Evening News. Christopher Nevinson regarded himself as aligned
with the Futurists after meeting them in Paris and distanced himself from the
Cubists and Post-Impressionists. Nevinson signs the manifesto as a member of
the Art Rebel Centre but he is mentioned in it as an English Futurist. Amongst
the artists who funded Marinetti’s performance at the Art Rebel Centre Wyndham
Lewis was particularly enthusiastic calling him ‘the intellectual Cromwell of
our time’ and ‘England has need of these foreign auxiliaries to put her
energies to right and restore order.’ In contrast it might be useful to compare
Nevinson’s note to Lewis that ‘I had quite a great deal of difficulty in
preventing Marinetti from again expounding and proposing his philanthropic
desire to present us to Europe and be our continental guide etc.’ And yet it was
this resentment of patronage that Lewis was to harness to his own ambition and
subsequently use against Nevinson and Marinetti.
The subtitle ‘Vital English Art’ seems to demonstrate a lack
of effect of Hulme’s theories upon the group. Hulme had substituted the terms
‘geometric’ and ‘vital’ for Wilhelm Worringer’s ‘abstraction’ and ‘empathy’.
Vital art meant a soft, naturalistic relation to life and environment and a
reverence of the Renaissance and classical periods in art. Geometric styles,
associated at this time with Byzantium, India and Egypt, and showing a
separation from nature, was seen as the foundation of the new art. To Hulme and
Epstein ‘vital art’ would be gross blunder in aesthetic terminology but to
Nevinson and Marinetti in merely meant art that is alive and growing.
As in the first Futurist manifestos, acadamies are attacked,
in this case the Royal Academy. As early as 1893 George Moore had called the
Academy an ‘incubus’ that must be destroyed before new art can arise (quoted in
Cooper – The Courtauld Collection; a Catalogue and Introduction p.36).
In 1900 Roger Fry complained ‘The Academy becomes every year a more and more
colossal joke.’ (quoted in Woolf – Roger Fry p.108). The Royal Academy was
the public’s concept of what art should be like.
The New English Art Club had been founded in 1886 to advance
the concept of art beyond that of the Academy – but it was reformist, not
revolutionary, and its sole aim was to catch up with French Impressionism, not
overtake it. Thus Nevinson and Marinetti criticise it for its effeteness and
unwillingness to go beyond Gauguin. The Slade, too, demonstrated an increasing
gap between the attitude of its lecturers and its students.
The accusation of effeminacy and the purely decorative art
seem directed against Fry and the Omega Workshop plus their general reliance on
inspiration from French Impressionism. The manifesto makes the point that
foreign daring is occasionally praised but English innovations are despised. If
this particular comment is also directed against the Fry group it would seem a little
unfair if abstraction is taken as key to this period. Vanessa Bell and others’
occasional abstracts from this period are in a very different, but no less
daring, style. Perhaps, though, they regard this as part of the effeminate
decorative style of the Omega. Also Marinetti, in asking the English to be
their own innovators, is doing himself out of a job. He expresses the wish to
create an ‘advance guard’ movement. He did so, but by default since it was a
new British based movement.
In the original version of the manifesto it closed by
saying, “so we call upon the English public to support, defend and glorify the
genius of the great Futurist painters or pioneers and advance forces of vital
English Art – Atkinson, Bomberg, Epstein, Etchells, Hamilton, Nevinson,
Roberts, Wadsworth, Wyndham Lewis.” Those artists, particularly Lewis, resented
being subsumed, without their permission, under Futurism and coined their own
term Vorticism. Lewis was working on the publication Blast in 1914, to
which Nevinson had given the name. Marinetti and Nevinson were both blasted in the
publication, in performance and by Lewis in letters to the press distancing
himself from any notion of English Futurism. But as Lewis well knew, a spat, no
matter how fatuous, was likely to good for business in attracting attention to the
major Vorticist exhibition at the Dore Gallery in 1915. Unfortunately war
eclipsed their publicity and in some cases cut short their lives; for example
Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in France 5 days before the show opened and
Wadsworth, Lewis and Roberts were soon sent on active service.
Copyright 1982 Ade Annabel
